


Games With The Hunter

by KrinnDNZ



Series: NaPoWriMo 2014 [4]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Bad Ideas, Furry, Hunting, Other, Werewolves, dangerously flirting with gods, lycanthropy, the magical equivalent of a mad scientist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-13
Updated: 2014-11-13
Packaged: 2018-02-25 04:44:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2608916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KrinnDNZ/pseuds/KrinnDNZ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Khajiit who has spent a great deal of time becoming an enemy of the natural order contends with Hircine the Hunter in the form of a werewolf minion.</p><p>"<em>I am playing a game with Hircine the Hunter. Hircine does not think of it as a game, but Hircine is not a very imaginative god: this is a large part of why I generally win the game.</em>"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Games With The Hunter

I am playing a game with Hircine the Hunter. Hircine does not think of it as a game, but Hircine is not a very imaginative god: this is a large part of why I generally win the game. Hircine—the Huntsman of Princes, the Father of Manbeasts, the Spear-Wielding, Narrow-Minded, Hilariously Egotistial Prat Daedra Prince—knows how to play one game, hunting, and to be fair he is the best at that game. Completely unsurpassed, as one expects of a Daedra Prince in the pursuit they're the patron of.

Lately, the game is played in the tree-bristling mountains between Skyrim and Cyrodiil: a cold place I'm none too fond of, the result of my losing the game a few times. Especially in winter, but even now in frost-nipped autumn, I would rather play back home in Elsweyr, roaming over dry lovely veldt, towering vine-clad jungle, and warm brown-green rivers. Not to mention that although I'm in no wise dissatisfied with the prizes as they stand, Elsweyr offers bedding yowling queens and supping on moonsugar: the finest and most toothsome luxuries to be had!

Still and all I've grudgingly come to respect the mountains: like Hircine himself, they challenged me, and growing to meet a challenge is the very center of my being. Magicka and flesh bend to my will, my thoughts flow through the world gathering lessons, and my body is attuned to every sound, surface, and scent around me. My body is shaped like little else in this world, and I've worked very hard at attuning it.

This evening, the game is played along a wooded valley with a stream at its bottom. Its northwest face is rockier, more like a gorge than a valley, but the other face has had time to erode. The valley begins where the stream emerges from a cave: that's its top, and at its bottom is me. I'd like to go explore that cave since caves around here generally have something interesting, but the cave is a secondary prize in the game. I'm flexing my claws and licking my fangs at the thought of continuing my game with Hircine.

Somewhere in the valley between me and the cave, there's a werewolf.

Poor puppies: they aren't Hircine's brightest children, and they tend to underestimate skinny women like me whether we're Khajiit, Nord, Redguard, or Argonian. They're brawlers with arms like tree-limbs, tall when they're not hunching, with magnificent pelts and other assets. Beautiful hunters. Easier to fool than you'd think, given that.

I spread my senses out, magicka glowing blue around my claws. The trees, stones, and sky are my allies. Hircine is an individualist (not a terribly coherent one, but, again, _not_ a very imaginative god) and his lupine sons don't wander far from the father. They sharpen their own senses and they're good at it, but at the same time they don't take much of what not-self has to offer. I dig my claws into the earth: I feel the breeze with the fronds of a fern, I taste the water with the roots of a tree.

Sometimes I am outside myself, as much to really experience the texture of the world as anything else. I fancy the edges of my body blur with magicka: I can send my mind flowing through them, but the experience of being a shrub, a towering pine, or a darting hare, is not one I can take back with me to my waking mind. I watch myself crouch, slink, stalk, hands and feet all on the chilly ground, moving with predatory precision, parallel to the stream and moving up the little valley.

The werewolf hunts me.

It is a central part of the game: who's hunting who, here? Who is properly the hunter? Of course I believe it's me. Of course he believes it's him. The world flows around us like two rocks in the stream. Sun trudges across sky. Clouds sculpt themselves around wind. Shadows creep over ground. Water rushes downhill. Leaves flex and follow the sun. The world in the raw has nowhere to be, nobody waiting on it. For all that the thinking, standing, speaking races of Tamriel have left our mark on it, the very great majority of the world simply goes on without us, before we are born and after we succumb.

This is a lesson that very few of the werewolves have learned: to let go of centrality. I have ambitions and I cherish them. Perhaps someday I will hunt Hircine himself. Daedra Princes have fallen to mortals before, and I would make quite a Huntress, quite a Mother of Monsters. But these are the ambitions of Jita Manyclaws, she who I am but also she who I can watch stalking along a valley and playing her silly little games with wolves and gods as though she is separate from the world and her desires are a story around which the world is arranged, or as though her desires arise from the need to be woven into the world's existing story.

I am fallible. I remember wolves' hands on my body. The game would not hold Hircine's attention so well, after all, if it didn't hold the possibility of winning as well as enragingly tweaking his nose, and _damn his horns,_ he can return the favor when I lose a match. Despite many whispers, many fangs in my scruff, many rough and growling touches, many times lying beneath a wolf who whispers contempt as he reaches the point of withdrawal, and many sore days afterwards, I have not borne a litter of man-beasts, and I cannot fully tell if I am lucky, if my countermeasures are effective, or if Hircine has been taking notes from Sheogorath and wants to pull my tail and tug my whiskers just to show that he can.

When he wins, which is infrequent and I do my best to keep it that way.

Part of why I can hold Hircine's attention is that his notions of predator and prey lead him to form notions about "natural" roles and "natural" bodies. Utter balderdash. I have sculpted my body to be mine first, a body second, and a prison never. When I can manage it, my "body" will be a place and a scent and a thought and a touch and a voice. I don't need organs, skin, or fur to be me: I can have a body without organs when I am properly assembled from flesh _and_ will _and_ magic. That I have, to choose one example among several, four hands, and boast six claws on each, is my choice, a choice I invested a very long time in, a choice to become myself.

It is also a choice by which I express that I wish certain people to become my prey. I have made many such choices: to the Hunter, that makes me an enemy of the "natural" order, to be hunted down as prey and—you see how tidy his philosophy is? Everything leads back to the hunt. I'll credit him with a bit of metaphor, though: he very diligently reminds me that for now, I _am_ flesh. Relentlessly-sculpted flesh to which he does not give enough credit. But still: flesh, fragile and vulnerable, susceptible to claws and teeth.

Then again, my werewolf prey is also only flesh. Tired flesh, too, which is part of why I've let the hunt go on for hours. We've from a distance glimpsed each other, but no more, and tracking by scent is no longer a faithful guide after we've spent this long roaming the valley crossing and recrossing paths. He's slowing down. I am not. There is no weariness: I simply watch the stripey, ruddy, long-tailed body of Jita—my body—and gently encourage it, inform it, suggest to it.

I know by now seven places I can set an ambush: I'm drawing him towards the one closest to the steep northwest slope of the valley. The ambush is a simple, brutal thing: I arrange for half a dead tree to fall on him, then move in unsubtly as he works to shove it off. He has beautiful muscles under grey fur: of course neither of us wears clothes, him because he's a beast, me because it makes me itch and makes me think too much of being merely one. I respect my past as a being restrained to the body I was born in, but of course once I had the option to not be so restrained, I went for it. Just as a kitten's parents give it the best start they can and expect it to build a life for itself when it grows up, so with bodies: I took the body that my parents birthed me into and built from there, rather than being the kind of terminally unambitious person who just assumes their birth body is good enough. So while I quite enjoy ogling some werewolf dick, I just as much enjoy their faces while they're trying to make sense of my double-barreled self. Often they want to touch me, although they're generally more respectful and docile about it after I've had my way with them. It can lead to some not-unpleasant luxuries, and a few of them have surprised me with their grace in victory as well.

But we also are fighting. I'm not surprised that he underestimates me. I'm surprised that he goes for not just one outright dumb move, but two: grabbing my wrist and my throat, his huge, powerful paws squeezing with terrible strength. These are stupid moves because I have three other hands to assail him with and my breathing is not particularly obstructed when someone grabs only one of my throats. Granted, my center head is very uncomfortable, but I just headbutt him with my right head and back off with my left head to avoid something like him dragging his claws across my faces. He realizes that he's made a dumb move, goes to adjust, and has gotten sloppy enough that I can deal him a swift kick between the legs.

Even as tired as he is, that doesn't bring him down, but it prompts him to more sloppy moves: to rakes and punches I can deflect, to bites I can evade, and finally to a tackle attempt that I can twist into him landing on his front with a huge thud. To give him credit, he _is_ much bigger than I am: had the fight started with the tackle, rather than in practice starting many hours ago, it would have highly favored him. Now it highly favors me, since he's exhausted enough that all I have to do is sit on his back and conjure up bands of magicka with which to bind his wrists.

He yelps, then growls, struggling under me. If the game were about appearance, I wouldn't mind losing to him—but there wasn't really enough prowess in him to make him a credible threat, and anyhow the game should be played sincerely. On the very short list of things that the hunter-god and I have in common is that we prefer a challenge: we'd be terribly disappointed at prey simply lying down at our feet.

We also share a taste for trophies. I really can't bring myself to take this pretty young werewolf stud's head. I suspect that ever taking heads was my self trying to prove something to Hircine, and I make a note to watch her carefully for more of that. Besides, there's another suitable trophy, and the wolf makes such a delightful yelp-whimper as I arrange that, then roughly grab his scruff and inform him of his domestication, of how no doubt Hircine is displeased with his failure as a hunter. Wouldn't it be a shame if other werewolves in turn came after him, seeking what no doubt he was promised if he'd been able to take me down? I ask him.

I don't bother hurrying as I depart. He's only slowly picking himself up, and my taunting was more for Hircine's ears than his. Perhaps Hircine will send two wolves next time: one wolf has been getting less difficult. Perhaps I'll relocate higher into the mountains and spend some more time adjusting myself: three heads is about as much as my shoulders can take, but I could probably sculpt another pair of arms onto myself. Perhaps the game will continue, perhaps I will cease to play as I sculpt myself into someone who is no longer invested in the game.

**Author's Note:**

> Bluh. I started this being all "oh hey, the Elder Scrolls universe has both Khajiit _and_ sexy werewolves, let's go there!" I ended up with Jita, who is somewhat interesting but who plays into my inhibitions. That makes for less-enjoyable writing. I am okay with spending some of my project time consciously engaging with my inhibitions, but it can be tedious. On the bright side, it was interesting to keep slipping unreliable-narrator bits into Jita's monologue. Hers is a story that I don't suggest you take at face value. Also, I need practice at the skill of pushing through writing things that aren't all fun to write, and this was good for practice on that.


End file.
